Who are you and where do you belong?’: Queer Reflexivity in Qualitative Psychological Research

When I was conducting the first step of the participants’ recruitment process for my research, I immediately had to deal with a first, unexpected, “external factor” to manage: one of the people interested in taking part in the research contacted me in order to know some specific characteristics of my identity, such as my age, sexual orientation, and where did I belong in terms of activist background. At that time, I didn’t realize how powerful that situation potentially was, as it represented the beginning of a deep transformation involving several aspects of my personal and academic identity. My research project concerns people aged 60 or more who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or non-heterosexual (LGBQ+), and involves a mixed-method design that use both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Using an in-depth semi-structured interview (Frost et al., 2019), I try to elicit participants’ memories of meaningful life experiences, as well as their current opinions and feelings concerning the cultural context they live in, and I ask them to define the different aspects describing who they are, namely their social identities. I gradually realized that the function of the interviews was not limited to provide a report of participants’ life experiences, rather they had the potential to augment experiences, alter meanings, and produce change in both the researched and the researcher (Beer, 1997). I therefore started to reflect on my position in the research field: my identity, or rather identities, significantly determined several aspects of the research process, from gaining access to the population to the quality of the content generated through the interview process (Rooke, 2009). As a female-born non-binary (NB) researcher who deals with Italian LGBQ+ older people, I experienced several ways in which my gender identity was involved during the research. For sure, as a primary source of contact and confidence with participants: indeed, older LGBQ+ people are - understandably - often reluctant to talk about the intimate aspects of their life and identity and it is a common struggle for researchers in this field to reach this population. It was common for me - while dealing with the participants in my research - to be perceived as a young lesbian woman - which actually was my main sexual identification for a long time - and to consequently find a personal connection through this kind of channel. The role of gender in my case tended to blend with sexual orientation, making impossible to split these two aspects. This represented a particular struggle for me as I wondered whether to come out as NB or not, finally deciding to do so only when I felt comfortable and/or when I perceived the coming out could enrich the conversation. Consequently, I started to consider also the “external aspects” - feelings, impressions, participants’ actions, etc. - rather than only the transcript of the interview as important source of data for my research. Adopting the concepts of reflexivity (Wilkinson, 1988) and positionality (England, 1994), I could rigorously evaluate how intersubjective elements influence data collection and analysis procedures (Finlay, 2002). Indeed, engaging in self-reflexivity allows to reflect upon the impact of social identities - e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, age, ability, sexuality and socio-economic class - of both researcher and researched, to take into account insights, and to embrace new research questions (Hesse-Biber, 2007). McDonald (2013) introduced the concept of queer reflexivity, by providing a theoretical and methodological approach for researchers to consider their own sexual subjectivity, including the multiple and mutable identities of the self. I identified three main identities as particularly salient with regard to the interactive process occurring between me and participants: (1) the non-binary queer identity, that is to be seen mainly as a non-heterosexual person, closer to lesbian women’s experiences as well as sensitive to gay men identity; (2) to be seen as young, and then to represent a different generation of the same community; (3) having an activist background, and therefore feeling closer to those participants with a similar history of struggles. Queer reflexivity was particularly suitable for my purpose, since allows to understand “how the acts of disclosing and hiding certain aspects of identities impact the research process, the data collected, and the power dynamics between researchers and participants” (McDonald, 2013, p. 133) and to evaluate how the social identities of my position as researcher have changed over time, both prior to and during the fieldwork. Through queer reflexivity, for instance, I recognized how my experience on the research field changed, switching from initial attempts of representing “objectivity” by wearing an academic armor during fieldwork (Lerum, 2001), to the acknowledgment of my personal involvement in conducting the research with the consequent recognition of reflexivity as a potential rigorous method, rather than a source of bias. I also used this lens to examine why strong personal connections emerged with some participants compared to others, as well as the consequences of this (lack of) connection in terms of quality of the emerging content during the interviews (Wertz, 1984). This contribution is positioned within a research methodology focused on the role of the researcher in the process of construction of his/her/their research object. Through this presentation I would like to discuss the way in which (perceived) gender identity potentially influences the research, but also how the research can impact the researcher’s identity transformation processes. Research is here conceived as a process and not just a product: “research as an ongoing, intersubjective (or more broadly, a dialogic) activity” (England, 1994, p. 244).